Test of Strength
GOULD, WILLIAM B.
Test of Strength KOHLER ON STRIKE By Walter H. Uphoff Beacon. 449 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by WILLIAM B. GOULD Labor attorney Though little more than six years behind us, the events of the...
...As Uphoff points out, the injunction is mandatory in cases of secondary boycotts and jurisdictional disputes...
...There is no compelling reason against enjoining an employer like Kohler for its unfair labor practices at the time when they are committed...
...The company's solicitude for every aspect of the worker's life was probably as onerous for Kohler as for the workers, but it was represented as being in the interests of all...
...Reviewed by WILLIAM B. GOULD Labor attorney Though little more than six years behind us, the events of the 1950s ring a note almost of the remote past...
...As Uphoff points out, Kohler and the UAW both came to look upon their problems as a test of strength that would have vast significance for non-union employers who retained the will to resist organizing campaigns...
...If not for the intervention by NLRB, this would have happened at Kohler...
...I am informed that the UAW House is not very happy with Kohler On Strike...
...Although workers at their Sheboygan plant, manufacturing plumbing fixtures, were exceptionally wellpaid by local standards (a great lure for strikebreaking farmers in 1954), the Kohler brand of paternalism together with inherently difficult working conditions created deep tensions...
...Equally important was the number of "right-to-work" proponents encouraged by Kohler's extremist opinions...
...The Kohler case demonstrates the need for more courage by the NLRB in its use of the injunction weapon...
...The company union, which was successful at a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in 1934, thus remained in power until the UAW won recognition as exclusive bargaining representative in 1952...
...The company even fined its workers for "defective workmanship"-entirely determined by the management...
...Eventually the UAW prevailed before the Board and the courts...
...It was Lyman Conger-Kohler's chief labor negotiator and counsel-whose advocacy of a 2-5 minute lunch period in the enamel department prompted this remark from Robert Kennedy: " until then I had believed that that kind of thinking had long since disappeared from the American scene...
...It was a decade when McCarthyism, Korea, Suez, Hungary and-in this country-the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in public schools were the principal issues...
...But as the author makes clear, the story begins long before the 1950s and does not stop until late 1965...
...If this is true, the distress probably centers on the book's detailed description of violence against non-strikers and others...
...After the Kennedy brothers were accused of political favoritism toward the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the Subcommittee investigated the story of labor-management relations at the Kohler Company in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the bitter UAW strike which began there in 1954...
...With or without the McClellan investigation, that strike ranks as the most publicized labor dispute of the 1950s, and it is admirably chronicled and analyzed by Walter H. Uphoff in Kohler On Strike...
...While Uphoff does not make any value judgment on this problem, this sensible plan, now proposed by many unions in "share the work" schemes, was certainly the least of Kohler's sins, if it was a sin at all...
...By the time NLRB remedies became an actuality, many employes had scattered to remote parts of the country and some had died...
...And it also was the decade when unions began to come under heavy fire, notably in the highly publicized hearings by Senator John C. McClellan's subcommittee on "Rackets," which included John F Kennedy among its members and Robert on its staff...
...Compare this with Senator Robert Kennedy's statement in The Enemy Within that because "no major steps" were taken to stop the violence, the "UAW, as a union must accept the major share of the responsibility, even though it was not possible then or during the [McClellan] hearing to show that the union had ordered or condoned it...
...Kohler paternalism further asserted itself through Kohler Village -a home for many of the employes -which was, incidentally, taxed to support the company airport...
...This was denounced as treason and countered by violent resistance, leading to a strike...
...But what kind of legal system could allow a decade to pass before compensating those who have been wronged...
...Breakdown in negotiations for the second contract resulted from the company's avowed desire to "teach the union a lesson...
...reinstatement and back pay were provided for most of the strikers...
...The Kohler family came to Wisconsin from Austrian Tyrol in 1854...
...After heat and dust in the sandblast department caused numerous cases of what we now know to be silicosis, Kohler antagonized the work force by zestfully challenging compensation...
...Indeed, the UAW was soon to be confronted with a number of other Kohler type disputes in which management was willing to spend any sum to thwart meaningful collective bargaining...
...And Kohler pretty nearly succeeded in getting away with it...
...Kickback," "blackmail picketing," and "expense account unionism" were the incendiary idioms bandied about...
...The conduct of certain strikers notwithstanding, it was Kohler's unyielding arrogance and opposition to "outsiders" in the plant which really cost it the NLRB case and some measure of public support...
...The Kohler case is proof that it has not disappeared...
...With the advent of the Depression, the Kohler Building and Loan Association deducted mortgage payments from the employes' wages...
...But Uphoff, declining to impute full responsibility to the union, leaves one with the impression that much of the violence may have been committed by young vandals and hoodlums who had nothing to do with the strike...
...In 1934 some of the men expressed the desire to be affiliated with the AFL rather than the company union...
...For the UAW the lesson of Kohler was simple: A determined employer in a community with a labor surplus could destroy the union...
...Civil rights was still primarily a moral issue, poverty could not evoke popular protest, and Vietnam was a distant place where the French had fought and been defeated...
...The distrust of Kohler became so intense that when in order to avoid layoffs it reduced the work week during the Depression, the workers thought the company, far from being altruistic, merely wished to save itself the expense of training a new work force once business conditions improved...
...Indeed this writer-while serving as Counsel to the United Automobile Workers in Detroit-was involved in the adjudication of back pay for Kohler strikers at the late date of November 1961...
Vol. 49 • September 1966 • No. 18
